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This video grab taken from the European Commission channel EBS, shows Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg during his audition at the European Parliament on the data privacy scandal on May 22, 2018 at the European Union headquarters in Brussels. / AFP PHOTO / EBS / – / RESTRICTED TO EDITORIAL USE – MANDATORY CREDIT “AFP PHOTO / EBS”- NO MARKETING NO ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS – DISTRIBUTED AS A SERVICE TO CLIENTS
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Eight years after the Federal Trade Commission brokered an agreement with Facebook to improve its privacy practices, little has changed. The social media giant knows full well the agency that regulates it isn’t up to the job.

Facebook announced Wednesday that it is expecting to face a record fine of up to $5 billion from the FTC over privacy violations connected to the Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2016.

The penalty would be the FTC’s biggest fine for a technology firm. But $5 billion is a drop in the bucket for a tech giant that racked up $15 billion in revenue for just the first quarter of this year, a 26 percent jump from 2018. The fine won’t get Facebook to change its ways.

The FTC has a well-deserved reputation as an understaffed, weak enforcer with a limited portfolio of regulations. Congress deserves much of the blame because it hasn’t given the FTC the tools it needs to do its job.

The United States remains the world’s only advanced nation without tough online consumer protections, leaving Facebook to essentially police itself. The sooner Congress passes an Internet Bill of Rights such as the one proposed by Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Santa Clara, the better.

The FTC’s expected fine stems from its 2011 settlement with Facebook. The social media company had told consumers their information would remain private and had then allowed it to be widely shared.

“Facebook is obligated to keep the promises about privacy that it makes to its hundreds of millions of users,” said Jon Leibowitz, then-chairman of the FTC, when the settlement was reached. “Facebook’s innovation does not have to come at the expense of consumer privacy. The FTC action will ensure it will not.”

Yeah, right.

The agreement called on Facebook to undergo an independent privacy evaluation every other year for 20 years. Then came Cambridge Analytica.

The data-mining company harvested information from 87 million Facebook users without their consent and then used it to target potential voters with political messages. Among those using the data were U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, Donald Trump and conservative mega-donors.

The scandal erupted in 2018, leading to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appearing before Congress for two days of testimony. But Congress has yet to take any significant action to strengthen the FTC or rein in Facebook.

It’s clear that Facebook and other social media firms have no interest in voluntarily acting responsibly on privacy issues. If they are left to their own devices, their actions would mean the death of privacy for anyone using their applications. Indeed, Facebook’s business model depends on monetizing user data.

Under law, the FTC has the ability to levy a $40,000 fine for each of the 87 million violations connected to Cambridge Analytica, or roughly $3.5 trillion. That would obviously be excessive. But the only way that Facebook is going to clean up its act is if the FTC imposes a harsher penalty that’s appropriate for the violations. Of if Congress imposes meaningful regulations.

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